Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Literary Russia Under Stalin

Born to a man who became a high-ranking Soviet physician, Gerstein (1903-2002) rebelled against her father's political affiliations early on. After a string of unsatisfying jobs, she followed a desire to write, establishing herself as a literary scholar and ensconcing herself among the literati of Soviet Russia. Her life changed dramatically in 1928, when she met Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda; Gerstein now had access to a quite famous living poet and his circle of friends, eventually including Akhmatova. The group suffered through the political woes of the time but also reveled in its literary excitement. Weaving biographical threads with autobiographical filaments, as well as selections from the poetry and letters of these two Soviet literary giants, Gerstein offers insightful glimpses into their world. She recalls how, when in transit, Akhmatova would paste an inoffensive poem over a more offensive one (the poem on Stalin that got Mandelstam repeatedly exiled was too hot to write down), as well as the way Akhmatova aged before Gerstein's eyes when she learned of her son's imprisonment. While the standard first-person account of Mandelstam is his wife's Hope Against Hope, Gerstein's portraits provide angles absent in that great work, despite a flat translation.